History, doctrine, culture, books

Laurie Goodstein's July 20 New York Times article "Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt" is stirring up a lot of discussion. I will give a couple of paragraphs suggesting this isn't really a Mormon problem but a problem presently facing all denominations, then I will give links to some of the articles and posts that have responded to the NYT article.

Once upon a time, the rare article or essay on Mormonism was noteworthy and bloggable. Now, in this extended Mormon Moment, there are so many it is hard to even keep track of them. But Adam Gopnik's article "I, Nephi: Mormonism and its meanings" deserves special notice, not just because The New Yorker is widely read and respected but because it is a serious and informed discussion. Maybe the media is getting better when it comes to discussing Mormonism.

The LDS Newsroom just posted another interesting essay, "Mormon and Modern." The essay seems designed primarily as talking points for a gentle defense to secular critics who dismiss religion in general as a form of superstition unfit for the modern world and Mormonism in particular as a new and therefore even less welcome example of religion.

I recently read a short essay by Eric Hobsbawm, "Identity History Is Not Enough." I came across it in his book On History, a collection of essays, but fortunately for you it is available online at the above link (except for the last page, for some reason). Mormonism is not mentioned, but the discussion seems to bear directly on the writing and reading of Mormon history.

Blogger and journalist Rod Dreher posted an op-ed piece at USA Today, "How much 'truth' is too much?" It reviews in passing the author's personal journey from faithful Catholic journalist reporting on the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to Orthodox Christian who prefers to avoid repeating that experience a second time in his new church.

SquareTwo, an online journal hoping to foster informed discussion and development of LDS issues. The introductory essay by Richard Sherlock notes in particular that history and sociology have had their day in the sun as avenues of discussion; now it is time for theology and public policy issues to move to the center of the Mormon Studies conversation.

I interrupt this vacation to note the passing of Richard Rorty last week. For an informative essay discussing one aspect of Rorty's thinking, go read "How Richard Rorty Found Religion" from the May 2004 issue of First Things. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. For a more straightforward summary of Rorty's life, see the New York Times obituary.

I suppose I could come up with a mellower title, but hey, this is blogging. Go read an online essay from a couple of weeks ago at PowerBlog entitled "Hugh Hewitt and the Mormon Question." Hewitt is telling everyone who will listen that Evangelicals who go after Romney on religious grounds are setting themselves up for other politicians — a fairly opportunistic bunch, these politicians — to go after them , the Evangelical Christians, on religious grounds. I'll bet half the country would agree with the following statement: "If you can't trust a Mormon in the White House, what makes you think you can trust an Evangelical Christian?" Would you? Evangelicals ought to just shut up and vote. Or at least just shut up.

Since no one commented on my prior post on real astronomy, maybe y'all are more interested in speculative religious astronomy. To wit, a Meridian Magazine post entitled Synchronicity as a Sign. It includes the provocative question, "Can a meteor be an answer to prayer?" Sorry, rocks are just whirling around the Sun following their prescribed gravitational paths, and every so often (quite often, actually) one plummets through Earth's atmosphere and is momentarily visible. It's not an answer to prayer, it's just physics. Even if you are looking at the sky with a query in your mind when it happens, it's still just physics.

For this week's online essay, go read Islam and Us by no less than the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, at First Things (hat tip: Right Coast). He sounds several notes of caution, such as: "[C]oncern begins with the Koran itself. I started, in a recent reading of the Koran, to note invocations to violence—and abandoned the exercise after fifty or sixty pages, as there are so many of them." And: "The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic conquest and domination in the Middle East, the Iberian peninsula, and the Balkans makes abundantly clear." He goes into some detail on these and other themes.

Before there was Big Love, there was Solemn Covenant (U. of Illinois Press, 1992). I think it's time to pull it off my bookshelf (where it has been sitting for a year) and actually read it. As a warm up (and for this week's online essay) go read Truth and Mistruth in Mormon History, an essay by Carmon Hardy, the author of Solemn Covenant. This one is well worth your time. Here's the first paragraph:

It was while doing research in preparation for a book on polygamy, especially post-Manifesto polygamy, that I encountered extensive resorts to purposeful mistruth by Mormon leaders and others. I will suggest that such practices have serious implications beyond the particular instances involving their employment. This was certainly the case, I believe, when dishonesty was used to defend polygamy.

For this week's online essay, go read Winter Light, a short personal essay in the November 2005 Sunstone. The author is Stephen Carter, who also had a longer personal essay published in Dialogue last year and did a 12Q on it over at BCC. I stumbled upon the featured essay following a visitor link back to the Sunstone site — it's always interesting to see what brings people to the blog. I'm sure you'll enjoy the essay. Writers love Alaska. Things just seem different Up North.

For this week's online essay, go read The Lure of the Web at Meridian Magazine. It's good to know what connotations the word "blog" has for some people in the Church. I think the odds just went up that the word "blog" will enter the Conference lexicon this April.

Edwin Gaustad posted a short essay entitled Roger Williams & Church-State Separation over at the Oxford University Press Blog (which any discriminating blogger will immediately add to their blogroll — where else will you find posts like The Year in Geography?). Roger Williams often gets overlooked in the bubbling pageant of American religious history, especially by Mormon readers who often have a hard time seeing anything of consequence in the historical record before 1830. Gaustad's essay (he also authored a recent biography of Williams) reminds us what a courageous figure was Williams, truly a man before his time. I'm also going to use this to resurrect my dormant online essay of the week feature.

I promised a weekly FARMS piece, so this week's online essay is Reflections on Secular Anti-Mormonism, by Daniel C. Peterson. It was his presentation at the recent FAIR Conference (hat-tip to M* for the link). Despite the title, Peterson spent most of the essay debunking the nihilistic bent of modern secularism rather than focusing on anti-Mormons, and I agree with most of his commentary. Our few Eurobloggers should find Peterson's remarks particularly interesting. He did, of course, throw in a few jabs up front, poking fun at Signature Books, one of its authors, and "Sunstone atheists" in the first few paragraphs before moving on to his main thoughts. What surprised me is that I actually enjoyed the piece. Perhaps he should write fewer book reviews and more essays.

For this week's short online essay of the week, go read the Daily Herald's interesting editorial on tax reform proposals being discussed in the Utah legislature. The editorial notes: "The Legislature's Tax Reform Task Force is considering the idea of creating a flat income tax in Utah with a single standard deduction. The plan ... would eliminate deductions for children and for charitable contributions." One might expect the Church to be opposed to such a move, but here is the editorial's summary of the actual LDS position: "But the church said it's not worried about reducing the amount of tithing from Utah members. It is other charitable groups the church is worried about" (grammar corrected). Right. I'm not sure what bothers me more: That some LDS spokesperson could make that statement with a straight face, or that there are a good many Utah LDS who will accept it as a sincere statement.

And professors. Those are two safe career choices offered in Nibley's famous Leaders and Managers essay (hat tip: Mormanity). Okay, his full list also included "artists, astronomers, naturalists, poets, athletes, musicians, scholars, or even politicians." To me, that still seems like a fairly selective, even elitist, list.

For this week's online essay, let's extend our range a bit: Politics and the English Language, a classic essay by George Orwell. He was an enemy of bad politics and bad language, and felt they ran together. In terms of its relation to language, we can consider religion a subset of politics, I think. You can see where I'm heading, but I'll let Orwell do the talking.

Can religious conversion piggyback on top of 12-step addiction recovery? Meridian posts an article and a link to Understaning Alcohol and Drug Addiction: An LDS Perspective, by Merlin O. Baker. The Introduction notes that "the average Utah addict is 31 years old, white and LDS." The book seems like a great resource for any Mormon who is dealing with their own or a family member's addicition problems, as most Mormons have little personal familiarity with regular, socially acceptable alcohol and drug use, much less addictions. But despite claims to the contrary, the excerpts in the "LDS 12-step program" section sure make it sound like LDS recovery (back into activity) and substance recovery (back to sobriety) are tightly linked in this approach. Or maybe it is simply a clinical fact that in Utah you can't succesfully treat LDS substance abuse recovery without also confronting religious issues? "Hi, my name is Nephi, and I'm an alcoholic." Yeah, maybe.

For this week's online essay, I recommend Christianity's Debt to the Vatican, by Peterson and Hamblin. They reflect on John Paul II, "a talented writer, a linguist, and a trained philosopher, as well as an attractively athletic, approachable, guitar-playing pastor," and ask what we as LDS should make of him and the Catholic church. They give a generous summary of historical contributions for which all Christians should be grateful, and conclude that we are all "indebted to the Church of Rome and to its popes. And, among these, John Paul II was clearly one of the greatest."

Meridian has a nice retrospective on Hugh Nibley by Orson Scott Card. It turns out that Card knew several of the Nibley kids as friends while he was a high school student, and he often visited the Nibley home, which he describes as follows:

Families are either open or closed -- and the Nibley home was as open as any family I have ever known. There was no pretense, though of course there was privacy. No one was trying to impress anybody.

For this week's online essay, go read Zeal Without Knowledge, the classic Nibley essay. This is also my weekend schmooze post, specially designed for people who have nothing better to do over the weekend than cruise a near-empty Bloggernacle, leaving long, aimless comments. Short and insightful comments are welcome too, but I know it's tough to think that hard on the weekend. My favorite line from the essay: "We [Mormons] think it more commendable to get up at 5 AM to write a bad book than to get up at nine o'clock to write a good one--that is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable, self-righteous prigs and barren minds." Wow. Imagine the flak I'd get if I tried to say that!

Mormon Books 2013-14

Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of MormonismGivens and Grow's warts-and-all biography of this energetic missionary, author, and apostle whose LDS career spanned Joseph Smith's life, the emigration to Utah, and Brigham Young's early leadership of the Church in Utah. My Review